WHO PREDICTED JESUS' BETRAYAL FOR 30 PIECES OF SILVER? (MATTHEW 27:9-10)

Only Matthew records the details regarding the blood money Judas received for betraying Jesus. And that is no surprise since (1) Matthew was a tax collector by profession and (2) of the four Gospel accounts, his is the one who most stresses the fact that that events in the life of Jesus were fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies. “Perhaps the strangest fulfillment quotation in all of Matthew is this last one.” (Beale and Carson)

The main question is, to which specific prophecy was Matthew referring? Matthew himself says that it comes from Jeremiah. Regarding this point, Freed turns to both Zechariah 11:12-13 and Jeremiah 18:2-3; 32:6-15 as the probable precursors. By contrast, Overman feels that Matthew is alluding to either Leviticus 27:1-8, with its mention of “the price of redeeming a person from a religious obligation” or to “Zechariah's action indicting the Temple authorities for corruption by depositing tainted money in the treasury (Zech 11:12-13).” 

The pay given to the prophet when he resigns his office is 30 pieces of silver.  Zechariah sarcastically calls this “a lordly price.” In fact, it is the same price required to recompense a slave owner if someone's ox injures a slave (Exodus 21:32) and approximately the price Hosea paid to get back his adulterous wife (Hosea 3:2). Finally, Beale and Carson even suggest that the final clause in Matthew's verses borrows language from the Greek form of Exodus 9:12.

    1. There have been several approaches suggested to resolve this whole complicated issue. One possibility suggested by Comfort, Barbieri and others is that Matthew really had several prophetic passages in mind as he was writing, but only alluded to the most famous of the two seers – Jeremiah. France offers as evidence for this theory the fact that, with the exception of 24:15, Matthew's attributed quotations only come from Isaiah and Jeremiah while any quotations from the minor prophets are cited anonymously (see 2:5, 15; 11:10; 21:4; 26:31).

 But even this does not narrow down the possibilities since both Nixon and Beale/Carson are divided between Jeremiah 19 and Jeremiah 32 as being the primary passage in mind here. And that does not count in the opinion of Freed above, who cites Jeremiah 18:2-3.

    2. Albright and Mann note that the quote is actually a loose paraphrase from Zechariah and “the confusion may have been introduced by the recollection that Jeremiah purchased a field and also visited a potter (Jer xviii 2ff. and xxxii 6-15).” Ellison offers the same theory, only to reject it, that Matthew's words “may be a free citing from memory...therefore, that Jeremiah is a slip.” But his personal opinion on this matter matches #3 below.

    3. Unger's theory was that “Jeremiah” was really the title for the scroll containing all the prophecy books from Jeremiah to Malachi, thus including Zechariah as well. As evidence for this possibility, Barbieri notes “that Jeremiah, in the Babylonian Talmud...was placed first among the prophets, and his book represented all the other prophetic books.”Hendricksen rejects this explanation as coming from a source which “cannot be regarded reliable.”

    4. Carr suggests that the original only read “the prophet,” without naming him. But a later scribe mistakenly added “Jeremiah” in an abortive attempt to clarify the prophet's identity. Comfort points out that the manuscript evidence for such a reading is extremely weak.

    5. Nixon offers yet another possibility: Only Jeremiah was named since a reference to Zechariah would have already been obvious to his audience. Beale and Carson elaborate on this same idea: “Rabbis at times would create a composite quotation of more than one Scripture but refer to only one of their sources by name, often the more obscure one...to ensure that others would pick up the reference. So there is no problem by the standards of the day for Matthew to refer to two texts like this and name only the more obscure prophetic source.” As another example, he cites what Mark does in Mark 1:2.
A very slight variation on this scenario is that Matthew “follows a standard literary convention of his day by referring only to one source (in this case, the more obscure, through probably also the more important one).” (Blomberg)

    6. Another theory offered by McNeile is that some apocryphal version of Jeremiah no longer in existence contained the information to which Matthew alludes. But this remains purely speculative in lieu of any hard evidence to prove it. 

Lastly, a secondary detail needing some explanation regards what the prophet did with the money he was given. The Hebrew text says he gave it to the yaser, generally translated as potter, but also used to denote a craftsman or metalworker (Boda). The Septuagint translates it with the Greek word meaning smelter or foundry. The Aramaic version translates it as “treasury.” A rough consensus combining these translations arrives at the idea that the temple employed a metalworker who received all offerings made out of precious metals. He would melt them down and fill them in earthen pots until a later time when the pots were broken and the metal remelted for fashioning into temple vessels.